


i got the mic and you got the moshpit

by bluenebulae



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Day 3: Fuse, F/M, New Jersey Emo AU Babey!!!, UST, Zutara Week, Zutara Week 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:21:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25582795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluenebulae/pseuds/bluenebulae
Summary: Zuko’s got a crush on his bassist. It’s an issue, but he’s dealing with it. At least, he’s trying to.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 23
Kudos: 226
Collections: Zutara Week 2020





	i got the mic and you got the moshpit

**Author's Note:**

> so this whole thing is basically a tribute to the early 2000s new jersey/long island emo music scene which was like, my entire teenagerhood. jasmine dragon and all their lyrics are directly ripped from taking back sunday's first album, but count how many other references you catch throughout this ;)

Zuko thinks that after two years, he should be used to this, but apparently he’s really fucking not.

The stink of the club’s tiny backstage isn’t helping his nervous headache, either – the whole place smells of sweat and whiskey, and it makes him wish more than anything he had a drink, but he’s too uptight to ever master the art of the drunk club show like Sokka and Toph have. Zuko’s seen Toph utterly blackout and still hit every beat, but then, Toph’s got some kind of cosmic connection to her drum kit that he can’t even begin to fathom.

Onstage, he can hear the opener start to wrap up, Jet’s husky voice growling “ _burn this city down tonight_ ” like it’s a threat, and Zuko starts counting along in his head: _5-4-3-2-what are you waiting for_ …

“Hey, buddy.” A palm hits Zuko square in the back, and he jerks upright, startled. Sokka is flashing his easy grin at Zuko. He’s pulled his hair back into the artfully messy man-bun that Zuko could never hope to pull off himself, and his guitar is slung over his back. “Little late for practicing now.”

“Nervous,” Zuko grumbles. His eyes have returned to Jet, who’s thrashing around at the edge of the stage like he’s possessed. The scout from Eyeball might be here just to see Jasmine Dragon tonight, but that certainly isn’t stopping Jet from trying everything he can to catch her attention.

“Why, cause of the scout?” Sokka shrugs. “Just don’t think about it, dude. That’s what I’m doing.”

From the scent of his breath – wheaty beer and something sharper underneath – Zuko’s pretty confident that’s not all Sokka is doing to stave off the nerves, but he can’t bring himself to argue, or to try and understand the other guitarist. Sokka’s a natural performer; not for the first time, Zuko wonders if it should be him or Aang behind the mic instead of Zuko, but even by Newark’s loose standards for singing talent, Sokka is woefully tone-deaf. At least he knows his power chords.

“It’s just like, one chick. It’s not like we’re never gonna be able to play again if she hates us.”

“It’s Eyeball.”

Sokka shrugs again and snags a clear plastic cup off of a passing sound tech, the amber liquid sloshing over the rim and onto Zuko’s Doc Martens. “Yeah, and there are a billion other record labels out there. Fuck it, if she hates us, we’ll just move to Long Island.”

He walks off humming Jet’s closing song as Jet howls from the stage, “We are the _Freedom fucking Fighters,_ Jersey!” Zuko resists the urge to slide down the sticky club wall into a puddle of leather and fear.

Instead, he fingers the strings of his guitar like a prayer, his fingertips flitting through familiar patterns as he mouths his lyrics. When the key changes, his calluses stumble over the minor chords, and he curses under his breath.

“You’re gonna break a string if you keep going like that.”

Zuko jerks his head around. His bangs – he should’ve cut them, he knows, but he likes the barrier they provide between him and the swell of the crowd, easier to remind him where he is and what’s real – fly into his vision. He impatiently shakes them out of the way.

Katara is standing before him, her own bass slung to the side, the specks of glitter caught in the resin shimmering like stars beneath the dim backstage lights. Her eyes are smoky tonight. It makes them glow even bluer than usual. He finds himself temporarily mesmerized, the din of the bar fading out.

“Anyway, you know these songs like the back of your hand,” she continues when Zuko fails to respond. “It’s going to be good. You know it is.”

“It’s bigger than that, Kat.”

“It’s not. It’s just another night. Tell yourself that.”

“I can’t.”

She holds his gaze so intently that Zuko wants to look away, but he can’t bring himself to do it. “Okay, then don’t. But then you can’t pretend that you don’t know your shit, either. Zuko, half of these songs are _yours_. You know them because those lyrics came out of _you_. And if you fuck them up, then who can tell you you’re wrong? It’s not their song.”

“It’s uncanny how you always know exactly what to say.”

“No,” she answers, “it’s my superpower.”

Zuko expects her to turn back to Aang, to whatever they’d been discussing, but before she does, she bounces up on her toes and she’s suddenly way too close, her body pressing his guitar into his stomach. Her perfume is in his nose – sharp and cool, a counterpoint to the sweat-and-spilled-beer musk of the bar. Her lips are on her cheek, and her voice slips into his ear: “you got this, Zuko. I know you do.”

He doesn’t move when she pulls back. The air is suddenly thick, and a hundred nights like this one spring to life, late nights in Sokka and Suki’s garage after everyone else has left but the two of them are agonizing over just the right chord progression, early mornings in the van when they’re the only two awake because everyone else passed out somewhere behind the Pennsylvania border. He’s thought to ask her about it before, just to make sure he’s not going absolutely crazy to think that there’s something, but he’s never had the words – not for Katara, anyway. He’s not ready to light the match on that fuse, especially not right now.

Katara runs her thumb over his cheek, just below the scar tissue. Involuntarily, Zuko groans. She just raises an eye, the hint of a smirk tugging one corner of her mouth up.

“Lipstick smudge,” she says. “Sorry.”

He stands there, dumbstruck, as she walks away, a sway to her hips that hadn’t been there before.

“Jesus, Zuko,” Toph says as she passes. “Keep it in your pants.”

-

The club tonight is teeming.

Zuko can _feel_ their energy from here, even before the lights go up. No matter how many times he does this, he doesn’t know if he’ll ever get used to the idea of people being anxious to see _him_ , to hear his words. It’s not like he’s got grand fucking delusions of being some kind of scene god – he knows it’s just people who want to get drunk and mosh, and Jasmine Dragon is a vehicle for that more than anything else – but the idea of having the attention of hundreds of people at a time, even if only for a few seconds, is enough to make anyone’s head spin. Sokka feeds off it like some kind of weird energy vampire, but more than anything else it makes Zuko nervous. Every set of eyes on him is another person he could disappoint.

“Do you see her?” Aang whispers.

“I can’t see shit, Aang.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Without even glancing at him, Zuko can feel Aang’s frown. “Suki said she was in the back. With dark hair and tattoos and, like – I don’t know, scary energy. That’s what Suki said.”

“Scary energy. Got it.”

“Shut up,” Katara hisses at them. Zuko can just make out Aang’s tongue darting out of his mouth at Katara through the dim lighting, and despite everything, he cracks a smile.

“We good?” calls Toph from the back of the stage. She hits her bass drum twice, and the crowd perks up, two hundred faces turning toward the stage like flowers to the sun.

Zuko takes a deep breath, his fingers toying over the frets, and glances sideways at Katara. The only things he can see are her silhouette and her luminous eyes, but it’s reassuring all the same.

“Yeah,” he says, “we’re good.”

And then they light the place on fire.

The moment the lights go on, the seething energy in the room catches alight. Sokka’s chugging guitar is the match, and when Toph comes in with her bass kicks, the fuse reaches its end: the room explodes, the mill of the crowd suddenly becoming a wave that surges up at them, bodies pressed against each other and fists in the air. In the front row, Zuko thinks he can even see a few people mouthing the words along with him – something he’d never seen before. Their faces are vaguely familiar; he’s sure he’s seen them around Jersey before, in clubs like this, if not at one of their own shows, then definitely at Mai’s.

He turns to Katara as if to say _do you see this_? but she’s utterly lost in the music, her right arm driving over and over against the strings of her bass, her left hand fluid as water as it glides down the frets. Hair falls into her face as she oscillates, and she impatiently tosses it back, the lights catching on her elated grin. It’s a good thirty seconds before Zuko realizes he’s about to miss his cue.

When he throws himself back at his mic, the weight of it is familiar in his hand in a way it’s never been before. Delighted, Zuko whips it through the air on a whim, watching it circle the crowd before him, framing the sweaty faces in his memory forever.

They’d only written two songs in the band without Zuko. Sometimes, Aang’s words taste strange in Zuko’s mouth, too cloying and stilted, but he’d never change them; the band was Aang’s in the first place, back when it was just Aang and Katara and Sokka in Sokka’s garage, wailing on a couple old guitars and Aang’s tiny plastic synthesizer. They’d gotten Toph a few months before Zuko, so when he joined after Aang had approached him at one of Mai’s shows, they’d already been a unit, one Zuko worried he could never truly penetrate.

It had taken time and one unusually disastrous six-stop tour up to Boston and back, the five of them and all their gear crammed in Aang’s shitty minivan, but the road makes bonds unlike any other.

(It’s also when he’d realized that being in close quarters with Katara for as long as this band thing they’re doing keeps going was going to be extremely difficult, but he’d have to deal. He’s living with it.)

Returning to his own words, in contrast, as soon as the first song crashes to an end is like a homecoming. Zuko closes his eyes, pressing himself so close to the mic stand that he can barely maneuver his hands around his guitar, and lets the music buoy him out across the crowd. In moments like this, he finally understands what it is to be bigger than himself, a part of something that he can finally belong to – not just his band, but the club, the crowd his heartbeat and the melody his oxygen.

When he opens his eyes, they fall on a shadowy figure at the back of the room, tattoos snaking up both of her crossed arms. Zuko can barely see her, but from what he can make out, she’s frowning. As he watches, she pulls out her phone, the glow lighting up her face from below and illuminating dark makeup and eyebrow piercings.

The melody goes sour. He chokes on his next line.

The next two songs blur by, every hit of Toph’s hi-hat piercing Zuko’s armor of resilience, the persona he’d carefully crafted for the stage. He finds himself glancing at the other members of his band more and more, needing reassurance that someone is just as terrified as he is, but Sokka’s grinning out at the crowd with practiced ease each time, and Toph’s a blur of arms and drumsticks and dark bangs too fast for Zuko to catch her expression. When he looks to Katara, though, she’s watching him, her gaze inscrutable but her mouth pinched into a frown.

“You okay?” she mouths during Sokka’s next solo.

Zuko shakes his head and drives his pick more violently against his guitar’s strings.

When he goes to tap his pedal for the outro, though, the amp squeals angrily at him, sending feedback flooding through the speakers. Aang winces, and the crowd stops moving.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Zuko growls, too close to the mic.

“Okay.” Toph stands from her drum kit under the pretense of adjusting a cymbal, but Zuko knows it’s just to catch his attention. “What the fuck is going on, Zuko? You’re playing, like, three times faster than the rest of us.”

“I’m not—”

“You are,” Aang says. “Are you okay?”

“I’m _fine_. Holy shit. Which one’s next?”

“Best Bet,” Katara says quietly.

Oh. Right.

Just hearing her say the name brings memories flooding back to Zuko: the darkened studio, the skyline of Manhattan glowing across the river like an ember, Katara’s fingers fluttering over the strings as she’s pressed up against his side, her soft voice floating across the room to harmonize with his. He hadn’t meant to write it for her, had never wanted to put words to the confused knot that tangles in his stomach whenever she stands too close to him, but he’d made the mistake of sharing the lyrics with Katara and she’d loved them too much to let them go.

Zuko has always wondered if, on some level, she knows they’re meant for her.

“Yeah? Let’s do it, then,” Toph says, and hits the bass drum for emphasis. “They’re waiting.”

Sokka and Aang retreat to their corners of the stage, but Katara lingers, watching Zuko. “What do you need?” she says quietly.

Zuko shrugs, feeling just how tight his shoulders are as he does so. God, he’s a walking pillar of nerves. “To forget.”

“Okay.” Katara nods. There’s something in the motion that makes Zuko think he’s just agreed to something, but he has no idea what. He wets his lips, the nervous tension suddenly flooding out of him only to be replaced with another kind.

“Let’s go,” he says, and Sokka goes.

He tries so hard not to look at Katara, but she’s still next to him, so close he could reach out and grab her. She’s swaying her hips to the music, and at “ _I could be your best bet_ ,” she shimmies closer, within speaking distance of his mic. Zuko swallows the next line in his throat, leaving Aang to mumble his backup vocals confusedly, and Katara whispers “come on. Just you and me. Like when we wrote it. Pretend we’re there again.”

He does. He remembers letting himself put voice to the words for the first time – his first time ever singing in front of Katara without anything to back him up, just his own voice warbling thin across the small space until she put chords to it, humming along with his improvised tune. Letting her correct the words – “ _but I_ can’t _stop this,_ ” she’d sang, her face so close to his in the darkness – as close as it is now, crowding into his personal space, making it so Zuko can’t think about anything but _her_.

Katara presses up against him, her shoulder blades digging into the small of his back as she leans, and he can feel her warmth through his thin, sweaty shirt, can fucking _smell_ her, hear her breathing pick up as her fingers begin to move faster. She’s writhing to the beat, her head thrown back and tendrils of hair falling into her face and _God_ , is she so beautiful and untouchable it hurts, and Zuko howls the words _can’t keep my hands to myself_ and wishes it true.

When Sokka switches to the bridge, she grabs his face in both hands, and for the slightest moment, he could swear her gaze dips to his lips. “You ready?”

“Yeah,” he says, and pulls the mic close.

Katara pushes her head into his shoulder as she sings, her vocals weaving in and out of his like a dance. The stage lights become the skyline, the seething crowd the waves of the Hudson River, and he lets it all wash over him finally, all those late night drives and jam sessions, the lingering glances, the way Katara is now pushing herself against him desperately, and suddenly he’s fucking _frustrated_ , every inch of his skin on fire. She’s put a match to the fuse with this, the one that Zuko had been trying to forget about since the first moment he saw her play, since the moment he knew he was always going to be at least a little bit in love with her.

Then, suddenly, she’s gone, dancing away across the stage, her hair whipping about her head in a halo, and Zuko pours every goddamn inch of that confusion into the mic, _I didn't want it to mean that much to me_ reverberating through the club the same way it’s reverberated through his head for months on end.

By the time the song crashes to an end, he’s gasping for air, clinging to the mic stand like a crutch, and the crowd is fucking feral.

He looks over at Katara, but she’s crossed the stage to huddle next to Sokka, fiddling with her tuning knobs. Zuko blinks, bemused. If not for the heat of her body still lingering at his back, he almost would’ve thought he had dreamed the whole thing.

As she walks back to her side of the stage for the last song, she throws him a wink.

That’s all it takes to flip the switch in Zuko. The frustration boils over into anger, and suddenly he wants to scream, to throw something. This is all a _game_ to her. The whole thing had just been a show for the crowd, a moment of distraction. She’s using his song – _their song_ , a voice in his mind whispers – for _fun_.

“Katara,” he yells, but it’s swallowed up in the crowd, and Toph and Sokka are already launching into the opening beats and he has to redirect his anger before the song swallows him up.

It’s only on the very last notes that he catches sight of the label exec again. She’s standing now, one hand loosely curled around an empty cup, and her piercing gaze is locked right on him. As he watches, one corner of her dark lips curl up, and she actually leans forward as he grits out the final chorus.

The crowd is still blazing when they leave the stage. Zuko wipes his sweaty bangs out of his face. It’s stuffy backstage, and he wants to crawl out of his skin.

As soon as the rest of the band follows him, he rounds on Katara.

“What the fuck was that?”

“What was what?” Katara asks innocently. Too innocently. She actually bats her lashes at Zuko, for fuck’s sake.

“You know what!” Zuko flaps his hand at the stage behind her. “That whole – _thing_.”

“Hmm,” Toph says. “I think it’s about time for another beer. Come on, Sokka and Aang.”

They follow Toph into the dark warren of the club’s backstage, Sokka shooting Zuko a hard look before he goes, and Zuko feels himself diffuse a bit. When he turns back to Katara, she’s got her arms crossed, glaring up at him.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m going to need you to tell me what’s wrong with you.”

“With _me?_ Come on, Katara! What’s wrong with _you,_ fucking – I don’t know – fucking _rubbing_ on me on stage and distracting me and all that?”

She rolls her eyes and sighs in exasperation, the wisps of hair on her forehead floating up as she does. “Oh, lighten up already. I was trying to distract you. You needed it, Zuko. You were about to burst an artery.”

“So you did _that_?”

“What even was wrong with it? I shared a mic with you. What’s the big deal?”

“You _know_ , Katara!” he yells.

“Then tell me,” she answers, her tone just as loud. “Say it!”

Zuko freezes, realizing, all of a sudden, how close Katara is to him, practically pressed against his chest. She’s still breathing heavily from the exertion of the show, her lips slightly parted and pupils blown wide from adrenaline, flushed under the dim radiation of the stage lights, and he can _feel_ the fuse burning down, five-four-three-two—

She kisses him.

He’s got his hands tangled up in her hair before he even realizes he’s moving, and Katara presses into him, shoving her knee between his legs, her fingers grasping at his neck, the back of his shirt, and he feels himself shaking, wishing he could burst out of his skin, wishing he could get her closer somehow, even though there’s no space between them, their sweaty skin sticking together everywhere it touches.

Zuko gets his hands beneath Katara’s thighs and hoists her up. The buckle of her belt digs into his belly, the heels of her boots rough against his back where his shirt has ridden up, and it’s all so hot and messy and _real_ and he thinks that even if he wanted to stop this now, he couldn’t; it’s out of their control now, both of them, the result of months and months of tension, the wildfire now ripping through them both. No turning back. 

“Get me out of here,” Katara whispers in Zuko’s ear, trailing her fingernails down the back of his neck.

“Katara,” he says, and his voice comes out rough, wrecked. “Are you sure? This is – they’re going to ask.”

“Okay,” she says.

“They’re going to know.”

“They’ve always known. Toph’s _blind_ , and she’s always known.”

“Have you always known?”

She rolls her eyes again. “Come on, Zuko. You think you’re the only one who knows what that song meant? I wrote it with you, dumbass. We both knew.”

“Why didn’t you – “ Zuko breaks off. Questions for another day, a day when Katara’s not hot and sweaty and writhing in his arms, her mascara smeared down her cheeks and her teeth biting at her bottom lip in an extremely distracting way. “This will make it awkward. The band.”

“So be it.”

He still doesn’t move, and Katara’s gaze changes, turning from smolder to soft. She runs her knuckles across Zuko’s cheek. “We’ll figure it out,” she says quietly. “I care too much about you for this to go wrong. I promise, Zuko.”

And he can’t not kiss her then, he just can’t, he doesn’t care that he’s probably covered in her dark lipstick and the impressions of her fingertips, he wants to wear them forever.


End file.
